Community Specific

I have written here about my view of the neoconservative hysteria in response to the appointment of Sayeeda Warsi to the Shadow Cabinet, but the fact remains that she, who for some unknown reason appeared on this week’s Question Time dressed as an air stewardess, has previously expressed support for Section 28, a now-repealed piece of meaningless legislation pursuant to which no one was ever prosecuted, because it banned something that was in any case impossible.

However, what was always this dead letter acquired totemic significance because a few activists who happened to work with children refused to deal with one particular form of bullying, as it was always perfectly within their power to do, in order to blame that refusal on this pointless little law. Those activists also have it within their power to define “the centre ground”, and in this case they are perfectly willing to use their power to its fullest extent.

So the soon to be Baroness Warsi could never have been made Shadow Minister if she had come from an English-speaking Christian community, whether White British, or Irish, or Afro-Caribbean, or Saint Helenian, or whatever. But she is a Muslim of Kashmiri origin; so that’s all right, then.

In the same vein, imagine what would happen if a separate political party made up of White Britons, or Irishmen, or Afro-Caribbeans, or Saint Helenians, or whoever, demanded that the Labour Party select a by-election candidate who was not merely a Christian, but the right sort of Christian as that party defined the term; or else face a more acceptable candidate at the ballot box. Yet the Labour Party in Ealing Southall is now being subjected to just this pressure by the Sikh Federation, which campaigns, not only for the official recognition of Punjabi, but for the legalisation of a specific, named organisation currently proscribed as terrorist, a demand such as not even Sinn Fein ever made in quite so many words.